Last week, Foreign Affairs published what I’m tempted to call a provocatively contrarian article by C. Raja Mohan, apparently a loyal fan of the US deep state. It bears the title, “The Multipolar Delusion.” 

Nearly all serious observers of today’s geopolitical landscape have concluded that the “unipolar moment” inaugurated by the collapse of the Soviet Union some 35 years ago has been superseded by something else. When, on September 11, 1990, US President George H.W. Bush declared that a “new world order” was emerging, no one could deny it. But once it became clear that China was not just challenging US supremacy but emerging as the primary trading partner of a majority of the world’s nations, maintaining a belief in a “unipolar rules-based order” swiftly became a minority position.

Mohan does make a valid point when he asserts that “the forces supporting the United States’ assertive unilateralism extend beyond Trump. An American foreign policy establishment accustomed to the ease of unilateral action will likely continue to pursue it no matter who is in the White House.” But he also makes the following claim:

“The reality is that the world is still unipolar. The illusions of multipolarity have not created a more balanced international arrangement. Instead, they have done the opposite: they have empowered the United States to shed previous constraints and project its power even more aggressively. No other power or bloc has been able to mount a credible challenge or work collectively to counter U.S. power. But unlike in the prior period of unipolarity that emerged at the end of the Cold War, the United States is now exercising unilateral power shorn of responsibilities.”

My reading of the current landscape is that the world is in a transitional phase towards a future multipolar equilibrium that will take time to play out. I do agree that the current behavior of the US, under both US Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump — even though their approach, style and emphasis differ widely — reflects an attempt to exercise “unilateral power shorn of responsibilities.”

Where I think Mohan makes a mistake — nevertheless understandable given the historically anchored Western mindset of Foreign Policy’s readership — is in supposing that multipolarity is about a geopolitical sport in which another actor is “mounting a credible challenge.” In other words, his vision appears to rely on the purely arithmetical logic of supposing there will always be one or more parties seeking to exercise global hegemony at a given moment.

I would even suggest that political scientist John Mearsheimer, who adheres to the idea of multipolarity based on spheres of influence, makes a similar mistake when he assumes that great powers are always and exclusively driven by the desire to expand their power over others. Mearsheimer’s realism correctly describes a predictable trend — a trend that correlates in particular with the current competitive culture of the West — but it shouldn’t exclude other possible trends driven by motivations not directly related to building or consolidating offensive power.

I appreciate and can learn from the range of facts and statistics Mohan musters. But I wonder about what I would call the “cultural origins” of its rather narrowly defined argument and the author’s tendency to cherry-pick the significant facts. I will cite just one that the Asian foreign policy analyst Mohan prefers to ignore. I’m referring to the shift of the center of gravity of the global economy over the past half-century from the North Atlantic to where it squarely sits today: in the southeast quadrant of Asia.

Another gap in his reasoning is his disinterest in the growing instability within the United States, whose K-shaped economy is likely to wreak havoc in the coming years. His notion of multipolarity depends on the success of a rising challenger. But the internal decline or potential economic and cultural collapse that may take place within a previously dominant unipolar leader may be a more significant contributing cause.

Perhaps the real problem is linguistic and cultural. Mohan highlights the fact that there may be multiple interpretations of the meaning of multipolarity. Perhaps for that very reason the term itself is unstable. Should we be talking not about a multipolar world but a polycentric one? Building that into the equation would, I think, lead to a different debate and focus our attention on a wider range of factors.

At this point, I was curious to get Claude’s advice. I included the preceding text in my prompt and concluded with the following questions:

What do you think of Mohan’s line of argument? Does it have strengths I’ve failed to notice? Are the weaknesses I’ve highlighted real?

Your critique is perceptive and I think largely correct, though Mohan’s piece has some genuine strengths worth acknowledging before picking at its foundations.

The strongest part of his argument is the empirical observation about the gap between multipolar rhetoric and multipolar reality. It’s genuinely true that no coalition has effectively constrained American power even as China, Russia, and others have loudly proclaimed the end of unipolarity. The BRICS grouping remains economically and strategically incoherent. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, far from demonstrating multipolarity, arguably revealed how dependent even large states remain on dollar-denominated systems and Western technology supply chains. On this narrow point — that multipolarity has been more ideological declaration than structural fact — he’s on solid ground.

But your central critique hits something important. His framework is unambiguously a product of what you might call Atlantic realism: a tradition that measures power primarily through the ability to project military force, dominate institutions, and compel other actors. Within that framework, only a rival that “challenges” in recognizable competitive terms registers as significant. This is precisely why the economic center-of-gravity shift you mention — arguably the single most consequential geopolitical fact of the last fifty years — barely figures in his analysis. Southeast and East Asia didn’t become the world’s manufacturing and increasingly its technological core by defeating anyone. It happened gradually, through accumulation, without a “challenge” in the Mearsheimer sense. The framework simply has poor optics for that kind of shift.

Your point about Mearsheimer is equally sharp. Offensive realism assumes that the desire to expand power is essentially universal and timeless, a kind of political physics. But this is itself a culturally specific inference dressed up as structural logic. Chinese strategic culture, whatever its flaws and however assertive it has become, has historically shown more interest in tribute relationships, buffer zones, and commercial networks than in the kind of universalist expansionism that characterized European great powers. Whether that historical tendency will survive Xi’s current direction is a fair debate, but Mearsheimer’s framework doesn’t really permit the question to be asked — expansion is assumed rather than investigated.

The internal decline point is perhaps your most underappreciated insight. Both Mohan’s unipolarity and the standard multipolarity thesis share a common assumption: the United States remains a coherent, functioning actor capable of exercising its power consistently over time. Neither framework is well-equipped to analyze a situation where American power erodes not because a rival displaces it but because the domestic political economy that sustained American hegemony — the particular bargain between capital, labor, and the state — is fracturing. The K-shaped economy you mention is part of this, but so is the institutional decay that has become visible across multiple administrations now. Hegemony has historically required not just military and economic preponderance but a degree of domestic legitimacy and coherence that translates into credible long-term commitments. That credibility is being consumed rather than replenished.

Your polycentric framing strikes me as genuinely more useful, and it’s not merely semantic. Polycentrism implies that we should be looking at multiple nodes of ordering capacity — regional, economic, normative — rather than a single axis of great-power competition. It opens space for asking about ASEAN-centered regional orders, about the role of middle powers as independent actors, about norm-setting in spaces like digital governance or climate where the United States and China are both present but neither fully dominant. It also better captures the fragmentation you’re describing, where the question isn’t who wins the great-power competition but whether the existing international architecture holds together at all as its American anchor becomes less reliable and less interested in the responsibilities that anchor historically required.

Where I’d push back slightly on your reading is on the question of whether the transition is as clearly directional as you suggest. “Transitional phase towards future multipolar equilibrium” assumes the system will eventually settle into a new stable configuration. It may, but history also offers examples of long disequilibrium, of structural transitions that generate sustained disorder rather than a new order. The 1914-1945 period might be the cautionary case — a transition out of British hegemony that didn’t produce a stable multipolar world but rather catastrophic instability until American hegemony was consolidated. The current transition could follow a similarly turbulent path, especially given the internal American dynamics you rightly emphasize.

I fully agree with your comments on the idea of a transitional period. I didn’t mean to suggest that any short-term outcome signifying stability was likely. The one point you make that I would quibble with is your assertion that “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, far from demonstrating multipolarity, arguably revealed how dependent even large states remain on dollar-denominated systems and Western technology supply chains.”

This is a two-edged sword. Joe Biden believed that the dependence was vital and existential. Russia’s resilience proves that supply chain dependence is a fundamental reality to be reckoned with for any nation. But the ruble was not reduced to rubble. The financial infrastructure of what was presented as the foundation of the “rules-based order” could be bypassed even when faced with the most severe sanctions.

I would see that as proof that this has become a transitional period. There’s no need for the existing system to be crippled and discarded. But if it fails to impose its iron law, wouldn’t it be fair to say that something else could and probably should emerge, not to challenge it but to function as an alternative?

Claude’s response began with the following concession. You can read the full response and the continued debate in Part 2, which will appear in tomorrow’s edition.

You’re right to push back, and I concede the point. I framed Russia’s experience one-sidedly.

The more complete picture is actually more interesting than either the Western narrative or the simple counter-narrative.

My provisional conclusion and what it might mean for education

This is an important topic that merits further development. But I’d like to point to two practical suggestions we can draw from the experience.

First, I recommend the strategy I’ve employed here as a basic pedagogical model designed for students learning to engage with a text. Whether it’s a history, philosophy, civics or scientific course, teachers could push their students to use AI bots to get “involved” in a personal debate about the meaning of what they’re teaching.

It’s easy to implement. It involves calling attention to alternative views or hypotheses — true or false, founded or unfounded — with the material they are engaging with.

The second point is about discursive strategy, and it applies to any object of debate. AI chatbots are not authoritative sources of truth. Anyone using AI to explore or refine their understanding of a topic should learn the trick of seeking an opening to push back against the AI’s response. It need not be an objection. It can be the kind of probing question we quite naturally ask in real conversations, such as: “Where did you get that idea?” or, “Where can I find data to support what you said?” or even, “Why should I believe what you’re telling me?”

As an educator, after all, Socrates may have been on to something.

Your thoughts

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[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.